The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Services specific to information and communication technology (ICT) often include storing data on persistent storage devices. The services may be available to users from almost any location and via a variety of communications networks. The services may include transmitting data across commercial and jurisdictional boundaries; for example, data may be created using computers located in one country and stored in data storage units located in a different country.
However, transmitting data across various boundaries is often regulated by various agreements and protocols. Examples of the agreements may include inter-governmental agreements, national and local laws and regulations, standards, and contracts. They may require persistently storing data that is governed by certain entities only within certain territories or boundaries or only at particular locations. The requirements may apply to a variety of data.
Hence, although providing ICT services inherently involves communication across different countries and commercial boundaries, commercial and international regulations and requirements may restrict how the services can be used. These problems become acute when the computers and data storage units are within geographically distributed data centers or cloud computing environments.